“They wrung their neck [to kill the chickens]. I never did wring the neck. Howard [another brother] did, though. Mama told him, ‘Son, go out yonder and catch that chicken and wring its neck.’ Mama already had her water hot. So Howard would just go ahead and do what she wanted him to. [One time] he picked that chicken up and gave it a wring two or three times, put it down, and it just got up and walked off. You had to break the bones and he just twisted it. That was funny!”
CHICKEN PREPARATION
SCALDING AND PREPARING CHICKENS
After plucking the feathers, cutting the head and feet off, and removing the entrails, lightly singe the skin to remove any pinfeathers left. The best way to do this is to make a torch of newspaper and hold the cleaned chicken over the torch with the flames barely touching the chicken.
Next, the chicken is washed with a cloth and soapy water. Then it is rinsed well and cut into serving pieces if it is to be fried or left whole if it is to be baked or stewed.
—Blanche Harkins
CUTTING THE CHICKEN INTO SERVING PIECES
(1) With chicken breast-side up, cut skin between thighs and body of chicken. Grasping a leg of the chicken in each hand, lift the chicken off cutting board and bend its legs back as you lift. Continue bending them back until the bones break at the joints.
(2) Cut the legs from the body Next, bend each leg at the “knee” joint and cut across the skin on the top of the joint. Continue bending at the joint until the bone breaks. Then run the knife’s edge under the joint to cut the leg into two pieces, the drumstick and the thigh.
(3) With chicken still breast-side up, remove wings by cutting where they attach to the body. To give them the typical shape, the wing tip is forced under the section that was attached to the body.
(4) To separate the back from the breast, imagine a line drawn from the neck down each side of the chicken to the tail. The line should go through the holes where the wings and legs were removed [as close to the backbone as possible]. Now cut along these lines. The backbone may be used to cook in a stock or for soup.
(5) Since a wishbone, or “pulleybone,” is a favorite piece of fried chicken, many cooks around here cut the breast into three pieces, first cutting across the upper part of the breast to remove the pulleybone intact. Then they split the lower part of the body in half, lengthwise, at the breastbone. It is recommended that this cut be made slightly to one side of the breastbone and cartilage, so that the bone may be lifted out before frying.
—Bessie Underwood
CHICKEN RECIPES
CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS
Boil or stew a chicken until tender, adding salt and pepper to taste. Remove the chicken to a serving bowl and keep warm. Roll out a biscuit dough and cut into strips or biscuits, and drop into the boiling chicken stock. Cover the pot with a lid and cook about 5 to 7 minutes. Test with a fork. They should fall apart when you try to lift them with the fork and will not be doughy. Dip out and serve in a separate bowl. Pour the broth over the chicken and serve.
—Lucy York
FRIED CHICKEN
Salt chicken pieces, dip them into a batter made of flour, pepper, an egg, and a little milk or water, and fry them slowly in beef fat.
—Effie Lord
Dip the chicken pieces into buttermilk and then roll them in a mixture of flour, salt, and pepper and fry them in hot grease; turn the pieces over as they brown.
—Lola Cannon
The chicken parts are rolled in flour and fried in hot grease. After browning on one side, turn the chicken pieces over, let them brown a few minutes, and then cover the pan with a lid and cook over low heat until tender, about 20 to 30 minutes.
If desired, the liver and gizzard may also be fried, or boiled in a small amount of water until tender, and then cut up and used with the stock to make a giblet gravy.
—Bessie Underwood
BAKED CHICKEN
First, salt and pepper the pieces and roll them in flour. Place them into an iron frying pan with a small amount of grease in it and place the pan in the oven to cook at a low temperature for an hour or so. You can also use cornmeal in place of the flour sometimes.
—Addie Norton
HOGS
Omie Gragg recalled, “We raised our hogs in a pen. [We’d] feed them, just like you feed chickens—every day. We’d feed them, [and] then we got our meat out of them.”
Adam Foster remembered, “My great-granddaddy was up at his house, and this old feller, Corn, had some hogs that got in my great-granddaddy’s field. Said he had a ten-rail fence, and them hogs was just layin’ the fence down. Well, he went over there and told Mr. Corn about his hogs. It was a mile or two over there, and Mr. Corn was just standin’ in his field. He said he told him, ‘Put them hogs up or I’ll take care of ’em.’
“Mr. Corn said, ‘Well, I will. I’ll put ’em up.’ So my great-grand-daddy went on back home.
“And the next day, they was back in again. So he just turned around and walked over the mountain to old man Corn’s. And he told him, ‘Mr. Corn, I told you to put them hogs up and keep ’em up. If they’re in my field when I get back, they’ll not get out; I’ll tell you that.’ He said, ‘I’ll kill ’em just as fast as I can shoot.’
“So sure enough, just as soon as he went back to the house, he shot what didn’t get away before he got through shootin’. They was a big bunch of hogs. He shot part of ’em, [and] just left ’em layin’ there. Old man Corn never said a word about his hogs. That was just the way people was then. They meant business when they told you somethin’.”
WILD HOGS
Eldon Miller told us about the wild hogs he has on his farm. “[Females grow a tusk] about an inch to an inch and a quarter. That’s all. The males average about six inches. We had one here one time [that was] seven and a quarter inches long. Most people, when they catch ’em, break ’em off. I don’t never do it. At a year old, they’ve got a set about an inch and a half long, and they are straight—dangerous. I’ve caught ’em that had tusks four or five inches long. We caught one three weeks ago, but it just broke itself down. Wouldn’t give up. We had it tied down and going to turn it loose wild, but it broke down, and we had to kill it.
“The young Russian breed looks like a chipmunk. They have red and black stripes, like paint. It’s that distinctive. The red turns black. Those hogs are coming back now. That’s what’s wrong with game in these mountains. People kill too much. I just catch ’em. When I was in the army, some of my buddies would drop around and want to see one of them caught, ’cause when I was little, it was fun to catch ’em. But now it’s not so much fun. We caught one in Mountain City. I carried my bulldogs all over the pasture. Nelson [his son] has helped me. He got his shirt cut. It came that close. Tore my britches leg.
“You don’t make any money foolin’ with ’em. It’s one of the best sports, though. If people would hunt them right—not see one, shoot it, and leave it laying—why, we could have a good sport. A big hog like that [the one they just caught] will dare the dogs to come in the lot. He seems to enjoy it as much as the dogs do. He’ll walk the fence, blow at ’em, paw the ground—just like a bull. [The hog that I have now] has attacked me one time. I didn’t have dogs with me at the time. That cur heard me yelling an’ come. That’s as pure a breed of Russian as you can find in this country. He’s two years old. I’m going to keep him for a while, then I’ll try to turn him loose in the mountains if I can. If I can’t turn him loose, I’ll have to kill him, ’cause a lot of time, they get used to corn and come back.”
“[I’m not too fond of him to eat him.] I’d enjoy tasting him. He’s killed a dog and been pretty rough on the rest, but I’m going to try to turn him loose in the mountains. After he gets wild again, he probably won’t come around close. He won’t bother you if you don’t bother him.
“I have run a hog like that for four hours, so you can judge by that their endurance and how they can run. And I have no idea how many hogs I’ve caught. I do that for sport. One year, I caught
twenty-three. Killed one. The dogs cut it up. Turned the others loose so they could restock.”
HOG KILLING
The hog played a vital part in survival for the Southern Appalachian people. Almost every family had at least one hog because they were cheaper than cattle to buy and feed, making them easiest to raise. Even those people who lived in town had them, because hogs could survive in a small pen with table scraps or slop for food. Depending on the size of the family, six to eight hogs could be killed each year to provide meat. Bill Gravley remembered, “My mom and daddy always killed four. There’s eight kids, so there’s ten of us altogether in the family.” Occasionally, a young pig would be killed to roast, but most families waited until they were grown in order to get more meat from them.
Gertrude Keener remembered, “My daddy and the boys usually killed the hog. We didn’t have to send out for any help. They’d shoot the hog and ‘stick’ it so it could bleed well. Then we scalded it in a great big washpot full of water. We’d pull it out and scald the other end. We had a scaffold that we’d lay it out on and scrape it. Then wash it down real good. Then hung the hog up with a gambling stick to take the entrails out.” A gambling stick is eighteen inches long and two inches in diameter and is sharpened on both ends with a rope in the middle. The sharpened ends are stuck into the tendons in the hog’s feet.
Sallie Beaty told us about killing hogs. “The first thing you had to [do was] to have your water a-boiling. You had to have your water at a certain temperature, or you would set the hair back on ’em, and you couldn’t hardly get it off. Sometimes you would take a tow sack and spread it over them and pour the boiling water [on them]. We would take hoes and knives and scrape the hair off of them. Then, when we would get all that done, we would hang ’em up. Then somebody would take their intestines out, cut their heads off, and take the liver and lites [lungs] out. Then we would take ’em to the smokehouse. [Next, we would] cut ’em up like [into] hams, middlin’s, shoulders, the pork chops, [and] the backbones and ribs. We would can our backbones and ribs most of the time. [But] we would salt-cure our shoulders, middlin’s, and hams.”
PLATE 137 Buck Henslee
Buck Henslee shared his experience with killing hogs with us. “I’ve never killed more than two hogs at a time. Lotta people have more. It takes about two or three fellers all day to clean ’em. You have to have help, because one feller couldn’t handle a big hog. You raise the hog as big as you can get ’em. We’ve some out there that weigh five hundred pounds. The biggest I’ve ever had was five or six hundred pounds. You start ’bout November when it gets cold. You have to start when it gets cold so your meat’ll turn out. You have to heat your water first. Build you a fire under the scaldin’ barrel—the scaldin’ barrel is just a great big ol’ tub, not really a barrel. Heat your water to scald ’em; then go out there an’ shoot ’em. You have to shoot them in their forehead an’ then cut their throats so you can bleed ’em. If you don’t bleed ’em, the meat will be ‘bloodshot.’ Then bring ’em to the scaldin’ barrel an’ scald ’em by pourin’ boilin’ water over the hogs. Then take sharp knives an’ scrape the hair off of ’em. Hang the hog up by its feet an’ pour hot water down it to clean it off. Cut the head off an’ wash it off. Then start at the top of the hog an’ split it down its stomach; an’ when you’re done, pull the sides back. Then gut ’em. Then the tenderloin is stripped out an’ then laid on a table to be cut up. Then take the hog down. Lay the hog on the table with its legs up, an’ take an ax an’ split it down the backbone. Cut the ribs out an’ cut ’em up with an ax. Take the fat off. It’s for cracklin’s, an’ the rest of the meat is cut into sections of streaked meat, fatback, shoulders, and hams. Then put ’em in the smokehouse an’ salt ’em. It won’t ruin if you put salt on it. You can wait as long as a year to eat it if you want, but you won’t have enough to last you a year! Ha-ha! You can eat it right then if you can get someone to cook it.”
PREPARING THE MEAT
Amanda Turpin told us how she cures hog’s meat. She explained, “We killed our own hogs and cured our meat with salt. We’d have hams and shoulders and sides [of pork]. We didn’t smoke it, though. We just cured it with salt, and it would be good too. We don’t have any good meat now like we did back then. My daddy was a great hand to salt meat, and he salted it just right, and it was good! Sometimes he would kill a beef, hang it up, and salt it. Nowadays everything spoils. You can’t keep things. I don’t know why, but it just don’t keep. The weather’s different.
PLATE 138 “Then take sharp knives an’ scrape the hair off of ’em. Hang the hog up by its feet an’ pour hot water down to clean it off.”—Buck Henslee
“We’d just butcher whatever [hogs] we had—one, two, or three. We’d build up a fire out in the yard and heat the water in big pots. I helped, but I didn’t like to. We made sausage out of beef or mixed the beef and pork together for sausage.”
Belle Henslee informed us about the many uses for hogs. “You can use the cracklin’s from the hog to make short’nin’ bread. You cut it up pretty fine, an’ then you put it in a pot and wait ’til the cracklin’s get good ‘n’ brown an’ kindly comes to the top, and then you strain the cracklin’s out of it an’ then pour that lard in the buckets.
PLATE 139 “You can use jus’ ’bout all the hog for somethin’.”—Belle Henslee
“You can use jus’ ’bout all the hog for some thin’. You can take the head an’ make sousemeat out of it. Sousemeat tastes kinda like sausage. To make it, you cook it off the bone good an’ mash it up an’ put in pepper, sage, an’ a little salt. Put the feet, tail, an’ head all together to make sousemeat out of it, all of it. It makes a good sandwich. You put it in the bowl and press it down. Then, when it gets hard, you put it in the ‘frigerator or set it out where it’s cold an’ let it get hard. Then you slice it off, an’ it really makes it a good sandwich. You eat it cold. You don’t cook it! I bet this is the craziest thang that ever went on!”
Sallie Beaty gave us her instructions for curing meat. “[To salt-cure the shoulders, middlin’s, and hams of two hogs, we] would use one twenty-five-pound bag of plain salt with one box of red pepper and one box of black pepper in it. [We] rubbed it on our meat on both sides and then either hung it up or put it on a shelf. [We would] put our middlin’s on the shelf in the smokehouse. Between each layer, we would put corncobs. Sometimes it would [be] three layers high. Then [we] would go back in a week or two weeks and turn it over so all the water that had drained in there and was settling would run out. [This curing would] take six to eight weeks. We would wrap the shoulders and hams—right when they put the salt on it—up in brown paper and hang it up in sacks. [They] always hung the leg down so it would drain out through it. [Once wrapped, they would] tie up [the bottom]. While the meat was being salt-cured, we would be smoking it too.
“The jaws [would be] fried like streaked meat. A lot of people would cook their liver into liver mush. Some people would put part of the heads in their liver mush. We also used the intestines and paunch for chidin’s. You’d wash them real good and soak them in salt water for two or three days. Then you would take ’em out and roll ’em in flour and cornmeal and fry ’em ’til they were brown.”
Gertrude Keener recalled curing meat. “We raised all of our pork. We didn’t know what it was to go to the store and buy bacon or sausage or anything like that. We made our own sausage and dried our own bacon meat. We made sousemeat. That was one of our favorite dishes. Cook the hog’s head and grind it up after you get it cooked. Then season it with sage and red peppers and press it down to get all the grease out of it. Of course, it’s already been cooked, but by putting the weight on it, it gets all the rest of the grease out. It keeps for the longest time.”
Lettie Chastain told us, “Hogs are killed when it’s cold weather. We’d have a wooden meat box and put a layer of meat, layer of salt, layer of meat, and a layer of salt. We’d get it covered good and let it stay about six weeks. Then we’d take up the meat and wash it good. My m
other always made a plaster of brown sugar, flour, and syrup to cover hers over. After she washed and dried the meat, she’d cover it with the brown sugar mixture and wrap it in a brown paper. Then she’d put it in a cloth flour sack and hang it up in the smokehouse to cure. Everybody cured their meats and kept them in the smokehouse. When I was a kid, I loved to get in the old smokehouse. They kept the meat, canned stuff, pumpkins, just anything that would last through the winter.”
PORK RECIPES
LIVER MUSH
1 hog’s liver
2 cups cornmeal
2 tablespoons seasoning salt
Boil liver until done and then run through a food chopper. After you have done this, add meal and seasoning salt. Preheat oven to 350? Put mush in a pan and cook for about 30 minutes.
—Margaret Norton
Hog’s liver
Cornmeal
Boil liver until tender. This must be made shortly after the hogs are butchered. Mash up the cooked liver with a potato masher, leaving it in the stock. Add enough cornmeal to the hot stock and liver to get it to the consistency of mush. While it’s still hot, pour into a pan or bowl to mold it. Let it cool. It can then be sliced and heated [and] browned in a pan when you are ready to serve it. Liver mush serves as bread and meat for a meal.
—Lucy York
CHITLIN’S—KONK’S
Clean all the fat off pig’s intestines, run warm water through them, and then split them open and wash thoroughly. Link into chains. Boil in salt water until tender and then cut into one-inch pieces. Sprinkle with cornmeal and brown in hot fat.
—Lettie Chastain
HUNTING STORIES
“Most anywhere in these mountains is a good place to hunt.”
Foxfire 11: Wild Plant Uses, Gardening, Wit, Wisdom, Recipes, Beekeeping, Toolmaking, Fishing, and More Affairs of Plain Living Page 27